I have been reading Sleeping Beauties, the novel Stephen King co-wrote with his son Owen, with a mixture of admiration and mild exasperation. The premise is extraordinary: a mysterious phenomenon causes every woman on earth to become encased in a cocoon of white fibrous material when she falls asleep. The Kings give this premise nearly 700 pages and an ensemble of perhaps twenty perspective characters – a feat of construction that is, by any measure, astonishing. Each has a distinct voice, an...